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Nakajima Atsushi/Trivia
* He was born as an eldest child of a Confucian scholar, into a family that deeply valued Chinese studies. Three of his uncles were also Confucian scholars, and his mother was a student of his grandfather.Chinese History in the Writings of Nakajima Atsushi * He had an unhappy childhood full of change and separation. His parents divorced; he went to live with his grandfather who died the following year; and then he moved back with his father who had remarried. His father transferred jobs often, and so the young Atsushi often had to change schools as well. The feelings of isolation from all these events may have prompted his quest to search for meaning in life.THE WORKS OF NAKAJIMA ATSUSHI: "War is war and literature is literature" * He was not close to his father and stepmothers. His first stepmother is said to have tied him to a tree in the yard to punish him. * He has had frail health as a child. He developed asthma at age seventeen and suffered attacks every winter; in 1934 he became critically ill from it and died from asthmatic heart failure at age 33.Moore, Cornelia Niekus. & Moody, Raymond A. (1989). Comparative literature--East and West : traditions and trends : selected conference papers. Maybe due to his bad health, Nakajima was an extremely sensitive and introspective person. * Even though he had an outstanding background in Chinese tradition, he chose to major in Japanese literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo. His graduation thesis was on Aestheticism, specifically on the literature and style of Nagai Kafuu and Tanizaki Junichirou. * He entered graduate school in 1933, focusing on Mori Ougai's literature, but he withdrew from graduate school and accepted a teaching position for Japanese, English and Chinese at Yokohama Girls' Higher School to support his family. * He studied French, German, Latin and Greek in addition to English and Chinese''Keene, Donald. 1984. Dawn to the West: Japanese literature of the modern era., read extensively on history, philosophy and literature of all ages and places, translated from English into Japanese works by Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, etc.Self-awareness in Sangetsuki'' * Even though he was an intelligent child (he graduated middle school one year early) he actually did not achieve wide acknowledgement even by the end of his life. It is said he lacks the self-confidence to launch a writing career. * Despite belonging to the same generation as post-war writers like Dazai Osamuhttp://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/reviews/2010/Askew.html A Biography of Self-Loss: The Life and Works of Atsushi Nakajima, he was not considered a war writer because he wrote nothing about the war itself. * His works are characterized by irony, 'exotic' settings, philosophical richness, vivid imagination, and refined, classical style.A Japanese Writer in Micronesia: Nakajima Atsushi's Experiences of 1941-42Tierney, Robert. "The Colonial Eyeglasses of Nakajima Atsushi." Japan Review, no. 17 (2005): 149-96. * His taste for the exotic may be attributed to his stay in Korea for six years or his stay in Micronesia later in life. * He did not publish most of his works to literary coteries or magazines. Even his wife once mentioned that he almost never talked about writings. * The themes most recurrent in his works are self-doubt, philosophical examination of the meaning of life, isolation, existentialism, the relentlessness and inevitability of fate, among others. These themes are similar to that of Franz Kafka, an author Nakajima Atsushi had actually read and translated. * His works usually have close relations with his own actual and mental experiences. In Sangetsuki, Nakajima instills his thinking and beliefs in the identity of literati and artistic creation into the protagonist Li Zheng, who is created as a tragic figure, who fails to achieve literary acknowledgements that he earnestly longs for. * Because he primarily used classical material, his works avoided censorship; 'Sangetsuki' is still included in Japanese textbooks for high schools students. * During the war, Nakajima was employed by the Japanese government as a clerk in charge of Japanese textbook compilation at a small island in south Pacific. * His stay lasted nearly nine months, during which he intended to write a story and submit it to a literary contest. However, his working conditions were unpleasant and the climate in Palau exacerbated his illnesses; as a result, he was unable to write at all. * Shortly after his return to Japan in 1942, he contracted pneumonia, which confined him to bed for nearly two months. * His 'Light, Wind and Dreams', published in the same year he returned to Tokyo, was a finalist for the Akutagawa Prize for Pure Literature. Kawabata Yasunari considered it one of the two works he considered the best. * By this point, Nakajima has been considered a promising new writer. However, his health declined and he was hospitalized in November 1942 for a serious heart condition caused by his asthma medication. No one imagined he might die; his father, expecting his stay in the hospital to be brief, did not go to see him. * After a night of asthma attacks, he died on the morning of December 4, 1942 at age thirty-three. References